GIULIO ROMANO AND PALLADIO
ing inspiration to classicist minds the other side of the Alps. SerEfo,
himself went to France in 1540 and was almost at once made!
"peintre et architecteur du roi". The so-called school of Fontaine-
bleau, where Serlio and the Italians Primaticcio and Niccolo dell*
Abbate worked, is the transalpine centre of Mannerism. Spain
accepted the new style even earlier—a violent reaction against the
violence of her Late Gothic. Charles Vs new and never finished
palace on the Alhambra at Granada (begun in 1526 by Pedro
Machuca) looks, with its vast circular colonnaded inner court and
the motifs of its 207 foot-long facade, as though it were based on
Giulio, somewhat provincially interpreted. England and Germany
were slower in succumbing to the dictatorship of classicism. The
style was not in all its implications appreciated before the second
decade of the iyth century (Inigo Jones and Elias Holl, see
pp. 157-60), and then not so much in its problematical Giulio
Romano-.Serlio form as in that created by the happiest and most
serene of all later 16th-century artists, by Andrea Palladio (1508-
80).
Palladio's style, though it first followed Giulio, Sammicheli and
Serlio, and as far as possible Vitruvius, the obscure and freely mis-
interpreted Roman authority on architecture, is highly personal.
His work must be seen at and around Vicenza. He designed no
churches there (though his San Giorgio Maggiore and II Redentore
in Venice are amongst the few really relevant churches in the
Mannerist style, as will be shown later). What he was called upon
to do was almost exclusively the designing of town and country
houses, palazzi and ville, and it is significant that the far-reaching
effect of his style can quite adequately be demonstrated without any
analyses of his churches. For from the Renaissance onwards secular
architecture became as important for visual self-expression as religious
architecture, until during the 18th century the ascendancy of domestic
and public buildings over churches was established. For the Middle
Ages, in a book such as the present, it was sufficient to describe one
Norman casde,one Gothic casdeandone Gothic manor-house. As to
the Renaissance examples discussed, half of them were secular. This
will remain the proportion for the next two hundred years in the
Roman Catholic countries. In those converted to Protestantism
secular architecture was dominant at an even earlier date.
Palladio's buildings, despite their elegant serenity, would hardly
have had such a universal success, if it had not been for the book in
105